Texas Culture & Language

Texas is a minority-majority state in which Hispanics became the largest group in 2022, about 40 per cent of the population, 80 per cent of them of Mexican descent; non-Hispanic whites are just under 40, Black Texans nearly 12 per cent and over 3.9 million, the largest Black population of any state, and Asians over 5. More than a third speak a language other than English at home, Spanish first by far, then Vietnamese and Chinese, and the German that was an official language from 1846 to 1917 survives in the Hill Country towns the Adelsverein founded. The religion is the Bible Belt's, Protestant and largely Baptist, with 5.9 million Catholics and about a fifth unaffiliated.

The popular culture is the cowboy's and it is lived, not performed: rodeo is the official sport, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo drew 2,735,695 people over twenty days in 2025, the world's first rodeo was at Pecos and the oldest continuous one is Fort Worth's, and the State Fair has filled Dallas's Fair Park every autumn since 1886 under a cowboy statue called Big Tex. Music is the other pillar: Austin's Sixth Street and its claim to more live venues per head than Nashville, Austin City Limits since 1974, the SXSW festivals since 1987, San Antonio as the Tejano Music Capital, and the western swing, blues and country the whole state exported. Football is a civic religion at high-school and college level, with twelve top-division college teams, more than any other state. Juneteenth, the holiday born in Galveston in 1865, is now the whole country's.

The high culture is well funded by oil: Houston's Grand Opera, Symphony, Ballet and Alley Theatre make it one of five American cities with all four; Fort Worth's Kimbell, Modern and Amon Carter were designed by Kahn, Ando and Johnson; Dallas has its arts district and the museum at Dealey Plaza that six million have visited; Marfa, since Donald Judd arrived in 1971, is a place of pilgrimage for minimalism; and Amarillo has ten Cadillacs buried nose-first in a field since 1974.

English is universal and Spanish is everywhere, spoken at home by nearly three in ten Texans and present since 1519; a little Spanish is returned warmly in San Antonio, El Paso and the Rio Grande valley. Vietnamese and Chinese carry the Houston suburbs, German lingers in Fredericksburg and the Hill Country, where it was an official language until the First World War, and Czech in the bakery towns. Texan English is Southern with its own vocabulary: y'all is the plural you, fixin' to means about to, a norther is a cold front, a tank is a pond, the Valley is the lower Rio Grande, and Tejano is a Texan of Mexican descent, a word older than the state.